Don DeLillo, a Writer by Accident Whose Course Is Deliberate

The author Don DeLillo and his trusty manual typewriter at home in Westchester County, N.Y. His newest novel, “Point Omega,” was published on Tuesday.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Don DeLillo, whose new novel, “Point Omega,” came out on Tuesday, is not exactly a Pynchonesque recluse. He travels, sees friends, gives readings occasionally. People know what he looks like: a slight, reserved man, now going gray, with an intense, serious expression. “I only smile when I’m alone,” he said recently, not smiling.

But Mr. DeLillo, famous for novels about dread, violence, the dehumanizing effects of technology and the invasion of popular culture into private lives, shuns publicity. Though he has become a cult writer of sorts — particularly admired by readers who have found novels like “Players,” from 1977, about Wall Street brokers who get mixed up in a terrorist plot, almost eerily prophetic — he is uncomfortable with cultism. “I was called a cult writer in the 70’s, when that meant that very few people were reading me,” he likes to say.

He is almost equally uncomfortable with his commercial success, which began after the publication of “White Noise,” his 1985 novel about Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies. Mr. DeLillo doesn’t teach or appear on panels or turn up at big literary gatherings, and he seldom gives interviews. He doesn’t use e-mail, because he says it “encourages communication I’d just as soon not have.”

Though he considers himself a city person, and still speaks with a trace of a Bronx accent, Mr. DeLillo and his wife live quietly, almost invisibly, in a Westchester suburb, where he writes in an upstairs room on an Olympia manual typewriter he bought secondhand in 1975. On a shelf nearby are a pair of baseballs signed by Bobby Thomson, whose 1951 pennant-winning home run is the subject of the famous set piece that begins Mr. DeLillo’s novel “Underworld.”

Unlike “Underworld,” a sprawling, near-epic of a book, “Point Omega,” like most of Mr. DeLillo’s recent work, is brief, spare and concentrated, a mere 117 pages. There are only three main characters, and their conversations seldom last for more than a couple of sentences. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that “instead of the jazzy, vernacular, darkly humorous language he employed to such galvanic effect in ‘White Noise’ and ‘Underworld,’ ” Mr. DeLillo had chosen to use “spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose.”

Mr. DeLillo got the idea for the book, he said recently, in the summer of 2006, when, wandering through the Museum of Modern Art, he happened upon Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho,” a video installation that consists of the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho” slowed down to two frames a second so that it lasts for an entire day instead of the original hour and a half or so. “I went back four times, and by the third time I knew this was something I had to write about,” he said, adding, “Most of the time I was the only one there except for a guard, and the few people who came in left quite hastily.”

The slowness of the film, and the way it caused him to notice things he might otherwise have missed, appealed to him, Mr. DeLillo said: “The idea of time and motion and the question of what we see, what we miss when we look at things in a conventional manner — all that seemed very inviting to me to think about.”

So he wrote a scene, now the novel’s prologue, in which two unnamed characters, an older man and a younger one, visit “24 Hour Psycho,” and he later added an epilogue set in the same gallery. The action of the book takes place in between those brackets, and Mr. DeLillo said it didn’t become clear to him until he realized who those two unnamed characters were: Jim Finley, a young filmmaker (whose only previous work is a 57-minute compilation of clips from Jerry Lewis telethons), and Richard Elster, a 73-year-old conservative intellectual still smarting from an unhappy stint at the Pentagon helping to plan the Iraq war. Finley wants to make a movie about Elster and has followed him to the Arizona desert, where the older man has gone to chill out and to exchange his ordinary sense of time for a longer, more existential view. Eventually Elster begins to sound a little like the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, imagining an omega point beyond consciousness and human evolution.

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The novel too slows down, in sentences that are spare and condensed, without much metaphorical decoration, but Mr. DeLillo was reluctant to take much credit for that. “I feel that a novel tells you what it wants to be,” he said. “I know that sounds pretentious. But that’s the sense I have. I felt I was discovering rather than inventing.”

A famously gifted elaborator, Mr. DeLillo still said about this book: “I did tell myself I can’t elaborate here, though at certain points I might have enjoyed that. It’s really the purest sort of impulse — a question of what the novel seems to want — and this novel demanded economy.”

So have most of Mr. DeLillo’s novels ever since “Underworld.” “The Body Artist” (2001) is barely longer than “Point Omega” and opens with a breakfast scene that is practically a still life. For most of its 224 pages “Cosmopolis” (2003) is about a man stuck in traffic. But Mr. DeLillo said that the spareness and near-abstractness of those books came more from the novels themselves than from any conscious decision on his part. “I’m not philosophically opposed to another big book,” he said. “I wish I could say I’m working on one, but I’m not.”

He added, “The last two or three novels are more philosophical, for better or worse, and more interested in the subject of time,” and he admitted that might have to do with his own age. Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”

“A writer changes as he gets older,” he went on, “but he still feels he’s writing with absolute naturalness when in fact that naturalness is not the same as what it was 15 years ago.” He added: “I guess I’m slightly aware that the last few books have been a little different, but I try not to think about that too much. I wouldn’t know how to talk about it.”

Correction: February 6, 2010

An article on Thursday about the author Don DeLillo misidentified the maker of the manual typewriter he uses. It is an Olympia, not an Underwood.

A version of this article appears in print on February 4, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Writer By Accident Whose Course Is Deliberate. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe